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Medicaid has given millions of Americans access to substance use
disorder treatment, providing health care coverage to some 3 in 10
people with opioid addiction in 2015. The program covers addiction
treatment services, including reimbursement for the life-saving
medications buprenorphine, methadone and naloxone. It also helps fund
other approaches that we know work – including raising awareness and
reducing stigma about drug use and distributing naloxone, an emergency
medication to reverse overdose. Currently, over half of the states have
increased access for Medicaid enrollees to naloxone. This is not just
about the urban centers we serve; a cut to Medicaid is going to be felt
in other parts of the country where the epidemic is acute, from New
Mexico to New Hampshire.

If the President succeeds at dismantling Medicaid, the emergency declaration will do little to reverse America's upward trend of overdose deaths. Hid declaration of a public health emergency is an overdue recognition of the reality of the opioid epidemic in our cities and across the country. However, without much needed resources to expand effective interventions it will be largely symbolic.

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